Marin TM Group--Mill Valley, California
NEBADONIA--T/R-JL

1. (Let Our Words Be a Spiritual Experience)
2. (Tragic Ironies)
3. (Loose Your Fear of Stopping)
4. (Relating to Another’s Inner Experience and Truth)
5. (Direct Spiritual Contact)
6. (Accidents--Chance--Randomness)  
7. (Feeling Constrained)

Dear Mother Spirit and Michael,    Once again we thank you for your very practical and down-to-earth lessons on what to do in trying times such as we’ve been experiencing.  It seems to boil down to how to make best use of our time, especially when certain activities may be cut off--like we get laid off or fired from our familiar work, or have to curtail our way of living for a while when we find ourselves in debt.  You, Michael, compared this to living in a kind of debt of bad, unhealthy habits.  Then suddenly something startles us awake and makes us reappraise--revalue the way we’re living.  You remind us the voice of God is within us and we can hear it if we are but still enough, and loving enough, and trusting enough to be open to it.  Then we need the nerve to experiment with our own lives, and be open to the results.  In other words: there is always that greater opening of ourselves to grow into, to use our time effectively.  For this reassurance we do thank you.  Amen.

NEBADONIA:  Good evening my loyal attendees, this is Mother Spirit Nebadonia.  I certainly welcome your thanks.  Michael and I and are both tickled when you open your hearts and your minds to us, and then further when you try to actually apply those spirit lessons we’ve taught; when you genuinely attempt to see things from our point of view.  Our eyes see you with love.  My continuing outpouring of my Holy Spirit is actually part of you.  Yet apart from our love and support, we do appreciate when you apply yourselves from your own spiritual perspective too.

(Let our words be a spiritual experience)

A question you may often ask yourself is: How do I know whether what I’m receiving in my meditation is from the Father, or is from Mother Spirit, or Michael?  As your Urantia book mentions, sometimes you can’t.  Sometimes you literally have to experiment and try with your whole heart, with your whole attitude--put yourself on the line, get out there and try something--to see if it will work.  All we ask of you, my children, is that you entertain what we have to offer, not that you in any way suspend your critical analysis, that constant evaluation you are making as a living being, that you need to make.  Just suspend any prejudice or disbelief and, as you hear or read our words, let them be a spiritual experience within you.

For you old-timers: we realize that some of these truths may appear repetitive.  But then use them as a checklist and be happy you’ve thought of these things yourself, or have become long familiar with spiritual laws, those Morontia Mota your own soul is based on.  Keep in mind your soul’s co-author, your Father Fragment/Mystery Monitor/Presence of God--and your soul--are active components of you and do contribute much of the meaning and value in your existence.

So yes, by all means when a sudden change comes into your life--either financial, or physical/health-wise, maybe some kind of irreducible stress or worry--use this as an opportunity to awake.  Take a deep breath and accept all those facts staring you in the face.  Let them in; let them have their effect.  Trust in the deep desire of your personality to unify and make sense out of all that comes into you.  In other words: keep growing.  Keep adding to what you already are, what you have already been.  Keep adding to this soul of yours, and keep relaxing to come from the center of it, the younger center of your human experience.  This keeps you from being blown about too much by present circumstances.  This is using your wisdom to stand a bit outside of time, outside the present moment, as well as deeper in it: foresight based on insight.

(Tragic ironies)

Michael and I, as your spiritual parents, do see, as we’ve mentioned before, that there is kind of tragic irony happening in so many folks’ lives, for they seem to be done in by success.  Old, centuries-old, millennia-old compulsions of, shall we say, stuffing yourself today for you know not where the food will come from tomorrow--if carried into the present day general success of a steady food supply, becomes the cause of those terrible afflictions of obesity that now plague not only your adult civilizations but even their children.  The use of strong stimulants to, in a sense, prop up an excitement in various activities that cannot support themselves on their own, calls for a reevaluation to find what--as you might say--really turns you on--“on the natch.”

The scientific method demands you try alternatives to what you’ve been doing all along and are familiar with.  If you want to know if something’s become a habit or not, try doing without it.  You are an experiential being; you literally have to experience different alternative ways of life to have any real personal basis on which to make your decisions.  So don’t be afraid, or feel that experimenting is somehow beneath you, or unnecessary.  Many of you have already found out that on the most critical decisions of your life, your own inner Spiritual Guide comes up with the best suggestions.  Michael’s Spirit of Truth helps orient your own spirit to better decide amongst all the suggestions you been offered by your family and friends, media and co-workers.

You are confronted with the fact that to a large degree your so-called developed cultures are shot through with very unhealthy habits.  Much of their peoples’ suffering is due to what is well within what you call life-style-choices.  That’s what we mean by the seeming ironic and tragic puzzle that people are killing themselves by their own successes--what they are able to choose perhaps for the first time in human history--ironic because on a deeper level they are not really keeping up with their own technology and what freedom of time it will allow.  The most precious thing in your life is time.  Evaluate, and reevaluate how you use it.  How are you paying for what you are doing?  Health-wise, are you going into debt against the greater health-potential you were born with, and can develop?  If living beyond your means are you are selling out your freedom of movement tomorrow and tying yourself to a stressful regimen?

These are not easy decisions to make, say, trading to get a little more free time and ease and lack of stress today for a more humble way of life.  A more humble, down-to-earth kind of living might be much more spiritually-soulfully satisfying.  To be spending less of your time paying for mere status objects, whether they be home or cars or clothing--whatever, means living less and less a merely symbolical life, and a more purely direct one.  This was the point of our last few lessons on feeling effort--really exercising your minds and bodies--rather than seeking to avoid it, thinking that this is the ideal life.  As your Urantia book states, even your Guardian Angel--whose love for you is unfathomable--she is more interested in your eternal potential and would rather you live a life of hard work, joyous play, and blissful rest: all of which depend upon your being evermore decisive.

(Loose your fear of stopping)

So especially in these trying times, be sure to take the time, several times a day, just to stop, sit down for ten, or fifteen, or twenty minutes, and let everything come to a stop so you can get a feeling for, and begin to exercise, your beginner’s mind.  Start Again.  We know there’s a yawning chasm of indecision to cross--to get in motion--when you so acutely feel the effort--the intrinsic physical and mental inertia of being a living material creature.  Lean into the effort.  This is the way out: to begin to enjoy that--here we go again--stepping off--getting into motion.  You will lose your fear of stopping to look around and reevaluate, my children, when you lose your fear of starting again--getting going--gumption--will power: all those good qualities we encourage you to grow.

So yes, by all means, use the time well, right in a middle of a crisis; use that up-surging energy of yours that wants you to survive and thrive; use it to reevaluate what you want out of life, what life is telling you is possible, and what your own spirit encourages you to try.  You are inextricably bound up in a cosmic adventure.  It may not be easy--for your own good, but you can come to love the adventure, and thrive because of it.  Never lose sight of the Author--(that’s with a capitol A)--who originated it, and you, to begin with.

If you have any questions or answers this evening, we’ll make that part of the format.  It is one of our regular features here. (group chuckles)

Student:  Good evening, Mother Spirit.  I have a question, sort-of two questions.  I’ve been involved with a group of people, not related to reading the Urantia book too much yet, who have had a lot of experience in doing psychic work--personal religious experiences dealing with their past lives, and entities and beings in their psychic awareness.  I mean they experience these psychic phenomenons as living beings who have been very useful to help with their personal growth.  Yet they’re also studying the Urantia book, and it is very specific about what happens when a person dies.  They go on; they may slumber awhile, but after a time they’ll awake, resurrected on the Mansion Worlds with a whole universe out there to explore.  They don’t come back to this planet.  

I don’t really want to challenge their personal religious experience, yet I want to be able to have a way to talk about it and explain, a way to bridge the differences.  And I’m not really sure what they’re experiencing.  So I guess my question is: what is it they are experiencing when they experience the memory of their past lives, or the beings who are in their psychic state?  I’d like to have a better understanding of what that is, and then how to communicate with them about it when the teachings in the Urantia book are so clear.

(Relating to another’s inner experience and truth)

NEBADONIA:  Yes, my daughter, Michael and I have discussed this in some depth several times before--the complex phenomena and/or interpretation you call reincarnation, or past lives, which a great part of the human race does believe in.  You are quite correct, the Urantia book does seem to go out of its way to refute these beliefs.  One example given was Jesus’ answer about why a person was born blind, whether or not it was because of something he had done in a previous lifetime, or something his parents had done.  Jesus had to reply that from the human standpoint there are truly accidents of time and space.  From the standpoint of God or the Supreme Being there are not, but when you depart from such absolute and infinite levels where there is no such thing as chance, when you get down to the human level, this is part of your humility--to acknowledge there are those unique happenings which cannot be repeated nor fully comprehended/shared/explained.  As we said before, from your perspective much of what we call the Unqualified Absolute does appear to you as Chance or Randomness--those Supreme/Ultimate connections known only to higher spiritual beings and God.

In addition, as we so often reiterate, you already have a personality possession of a quasi-spiritual cosmic fact, your very own soul.  As its co-author is a fragment of God himself, this is you seen and experienced from His point of view.  And so, by comparison to your conscious, physical brain-wave memories, it is quite enormous.  This very enormity of your soul, striving and becoming conscious to influence your conscious life, can be registered as coming from previous lifetimes.  

You also have another aspect of your mentality for God writes very, very small indeed in the DNA that comprises you--what some of you call ancestral experiences, abilities, interests, from your two parents, your four  grandparents, your eight great-grandparents, and so forth, right in your nerve structure.

These inner experiences of soul and heredity are often interpreted by years and years of study in the deep philosophies of ancient and modern religions, and form an inner body of truth--some call it Karma--of which, if you examine it, every person has a unique interpretation, just as every person has their own unique feelings and notions and experiences with God, with my Holy Spirit, with Michael and Jesus.

So this is what you are confronting. Our advice is just to be open and take it in, let your own spirit and soul recognize their inner experience beneath their means of expression.  For if you think of it, my daughter, this is the challenge before the whole human race.  How can you get beyond any superficial, often dogmatic or contentious form to the living spiritual experience lying underneath it?  When people tell you about their previous lives, try to share some kindred experience there.  This is their own soul and their own higher consciousness of truth, for it’s exactly right where their own higher consciousness fades away that their soul, and the import of their Father Fragment, kind-of overlap--if you will: one leads right to the other.  What they might be taking as some great truth from a previous lifetime might even be their own Father Fragment’s input.  

But to answer you: yes, in the most literal sense of a succession of human lives lived on ones initial planet: there is no such thing.  Your Urantia book even goes to the point of mentioning the animal life on the Morontia realms as being the only kind of reincarnation, where these rather rudimentary but highly intelligent kinds of animal personalities do enjoy a succession of Morontia bodies and do accumulate something like a soul; and goes on to state this is the only kind of reincarnation within our Local Universe of Nebadon.

Student:  And show them when they speak of having experiences with these entities or beings, those are really just, in a sense, from their memories, from their soul or something--from somewhere in their own, either sub-conscious or unconscious minds--the part of them they’re not aware of?

(Direct spiritual contact)

NEBADONIA:  Not exactly--(she laughs).  It can be more than that.  As we’ve said before: your spirit can be directly cognizant of being in contact with other spirits, even what you feel is the Great Spirit, the One Spirit, for it is very rare for a human being to be able to separate the various, more pure spiritual influences such as their Father Fragment, my Holy spirit, and Michael’s Spirit of Truth.  You more or less register these as one--correctly so: we three are very close by our inherent natures.  But as you interpret and express to yourself this pure spirit communication in conscious thought, these thoughts--the very language and structure--are culturally conditioned.  You may have been raised to interpret all spiritual input as being solely from one kind of psychic personality to another.  

So I must also caution you, my daughter, that spiritual contact is possible and does happen: Thought Adjuster-to-Thought Adjuster contact: contact with your Guardian Angel; other spiritual influences--there’s a whole network, a spiritual family which has been on Urantia now for thousands of years.  These do influence--(Nebadonia breaks out laughing)--that’s their purpose!--they do influence human behavior, and thought, and realization: the Angels of Progress, and so forth.

Student:  Right.  But when an individual experiences some entity or being as a negative influence they don’t want, and they seem unable to get rid of it, on their own…?

NEBADONIA:  As you Urantia book says, Caligastia got, and still gets, a lot of credit for what was, and still is, merely animal or very primitive human behavior hanging on. The Lucifer Rebellion has been adjudicated.  Rebel spirits no longer exist on Urantia.  

Student:  But individuals will experience the psychic/psychological phenomena as a way to describe it--because that’s what they’ve learned?

NEBADONIA:  Exactly.  Even though the Lucifer Rebellion was two hundred thousand years ago, its profound effect upon Urantia means that its characteristic behavioral traits--in this context, ways of interpreting reality--are still continuing.  Your planetary civilization was still in its beginning, developing stages when it suffered this enormous setback.   So you still have a persistence of Lucifer’s doctrine, if you will.  

Student:  And it’s in the culture and the living memories…?

NEBADONIA:  Think of the last two hundred thousand years of incessant warfare which lies just beneath the surface of you all and comes out every now and then in the form of road-rage, or whatever--when you loose your civilizing temper.  You still live among enormous amounts of crime at all levels of society, and fantastic national expenditures all over the earth for armaments for offensive and defensive warfare.  We even tease you to imagine, starting at any point, say--tomorrow; what the human race faces if all of a sudden everyone could start shedding their bad habits and start living in accord with the presence of God within them, so you could drop your social and national and international defensiveness.  It’s almost, ironically, as if the human race had a terrible fear of paradise, for it would ensue very shortly.  It’s like the irony of seeming to perish from success--you can’t adapt quickly enough; yet your Urantia book talks about a necessarily slow--in order to be lasting--evolution.  Getting too far ahead of yourselves in one aspect over another, as a race or as an individual, is disastrous.  

These considerations are all in the mix.  This is what you contend with right in your own personal day to day life.  Think of those who win the lottery and are thrown into confusion, even to the detriment of their spiritual growth.  But I hope I’ve answered your question about how to interpret others--within your own realization, your own understanding of reality, giving full credit without prejudice, without condescension, to the way other people express their truth.  Always let your own spirit feel for the spirit and the meaning within their expression.                                  

Student:  Yes, but I find some of it to be a little wearing.  It puts me off; it’s almost as if I don’t want to take it in.  I don’t really have a way of thinking about it.  I don’t know what to do with it--when a person explains their inner life in a way I don’t experience mine.

NEBADONIA:  Yes, my daughter, that is another facet of their uniqueness--with which we’ve been encouraging you to find some way not to be overwhelmed.  For without taking them in, without understanding how they see themselves, you have no clue to their behavior--the motives behind their behavior.

Student:  Right.  In some ways it just seems very foreign to me, especially when there’s a number of different cultural ways of explaining their interior life.

NEBADONIA:  Yes, you do come in many flavors, many colors and shades, in expressing the evolution of literally thousands and thousands of little sub-cultures all over the planet.  This is the wealth of variety you have to offer each other.  So let it expand you.  Let it blow your mind from time to time and trust you will come to unify it all.  It will give you a deeper sense of why people do things, why things are as they are.  

At times you may righteously bridle that they are using their interpretation to coerce you.  That’s part of the picture too.  Sometimes people use their beliefs to assume a certain authority, and you are righteously cautious about that.  But if you take things in with the tough equanimity, the sturdy balance I spoke of, this is the best example for them to let you into their understanding--to recognize your spirit and your way of understanding things.  

That’s the great exchange.  Wait until you get into contact with other beings beside Urantians.  (much laughter--Yes)  You’ll be mingling right off with a variety of human types from over six hundred other planets of your System, as well as visualizing the lower types of spirits.  As you put it: You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!  (she laughs)

Student:  Yes--thank you very much for that.  (Be in my love)

Student:  Mother Spirit, if the Lucifer Rebellion had not happened, would there still be accidents of time and space?

 (Accidents--chance--randomness)  

NEBADONIA:  Yes; they never cease.  It isn’t until you begin to approach--after many billions of years--the viewpoint of the Supreme Being, does the chance element of reality seem to almost disappear.  So it’s a long progressive learning as you approach, and encounter, and then encompass literally hundreds of dimensions of cosmic reality which are now far beyond your present ability to detect and comprehend.  There is no way we can express to you what these are, except to inform you they are real and you will encounter them at every stage as you work up through your System, the Constellations, your Local Universe, and then head out into the galaxy.  Every little stage is accompanied by an increase in perception and understanding.  It isn’t until your understanding approaches completeness does the unqualified aspect of total reality progressively disappear.

Student:  But why is there chance in the first place?  Why is that even there?--if God is absolute?

NEBADONIA:  There is no chance from the standpoint of God, or the Supreme Being of time and space.  There is from the limited human viewpoint.  In the same way, my son, you are caught up in the humanly unfathomable providence of an enormous cosmic mechanism, yet at the same time this is not what you ordinarily think of as fatalism.  A fatalist may perceive how he is only a tiny part of a large mechanism, and get the feeling that everything is preordained--that somehow or another he is just moving along a pre-set track laid out in God’s mind.  He can not understand how God himself is enjoying the free-will nature of His own created personal beings unfolding their own destinies one little step at a time.  His fore-knowledge is existential; but experientially, He is riding right along with you, moment by moment--with you, through you, as you!

There is great humility in realizing that as a human being you are just starting out on an across-the-cosmos fantastic journey, and every stage of your development--especially the early stages as you go through hundreds of progressive Morontia manifestations of person-hood--every stage is marked by an increase in dimensional understanding.

Student:  Well, thank you for that.  That was great!--(much laughter)--taking all that in.  So: a fatalistic attitude of my life being preordained; is that not a good thing, or is that cool?  

NEBADONIA:  Part of it is a recognition that there is a kind of pre-destination.  There is a trend to the planets, to the Systems, to the Constellations, and the Local Universes.  There is an inexorable cosmos-wide evolution taking place, and you are a living part of this living organism.  In this sense the creation is God’s living body.  

But within this encompassing you do have an enormous amount of freedom within your own life.  While the universe’s destiny is God’s and never in doubt, your own, personal destiny is up to you.  This distinguishes you as a person.  No impersonal mechanism or manifestation has this choice.  So if you feel you are on someone else’s--even God’s--preordained track, you’re not consciously exercising, and taking responsibility for, what is your own creative nature.  This is the universal sticking-point to true progress: how do you get intrinsically creative individuals to accept responsibility for their own self-created lives, when they perceive they are only helpless pawns and everything bad is someone else’s fault?  How do you get a fatalistic person, raised in a fatalistic culture, to accept the fact that he is experiencing his own self-fulfilling philosophy of life?  That takes faith.  We can only tease you into trying to see things in a way that does give credence to your own personal spiritual creativity, and then act upon that inner vision to make it objectively real.

Student:  I often feel there’s something like God’s time that can’t be pushed or coerced, that somehow His mechanism even applies to my family problems like my daughter and her family trying to find a new place.  And my own eternal potential is also somehow tied up in all of this.  I need to be open to God’s time.  Am I making myself clear?  I want to keep in touch and not be distracted by things that lead me away from love and compassion--that part of God’s will.   

NEBADONIA:  My son, you are expressing very well the fact you are not yet a fully united being.  (much laughter)  And so you express all these different parts of yourself…

Student:  But I do feel strongly that spiritual pull.

NEBADONIA:  Yes, you can feel--as you said--an inner potential that urges you to keep growing.  I once pointed out that your own curiosity can seem a curse that has you wondering about and questioning things.  Some folks would rather they could find and accept things without question--settle for something forever and ever.  I remember you once said how you fear that very thing, that settling down to some total and blind acceptance.  So I would ask: what’s the problem?  

Student:  Oh!--there isn’t any!  (much laughter)  I was just wondering about my feeling of God’s time.  There’s all this stuff going on around me---chaos and fear and stuff all over the world--yet underlying this is another way--God’s way--some easier or more peaceful way--what you said once about real success and accomplishment.  Because I do feel blessed that way about my work, my gardening.  I work outside with living things…  I do have a humble existence…(more laughter)…  Well--you know.  It doesn’t seem very humble to say it.  Anyway…

NEBADONIA:  I agree, it is hard sometimes to feel that humility is a spiritual blessing.  Before the perfect inner unity we’ve spoken of, that you must slowly earn, you will go back and forth between feeling blessed you can be aware of the enormity of what you are facing, and then alternately see what a tiny little speck you are, and how powerless and insignificant you seem to be in the face of all of that out there--God’s time and His natural law--even simple physical law that says there are only so many places for your daughter and her family to find.  You are constantly finding your balance between a limitless desire and potential, and a very gritty nitty, moment to moment, being an inescapably physical person, in an equally inescapable physical world, without unlimited power or knowledge or understanding.  But you are growing these.  And as you grow these, then chance, or the chafing element--if you will--of God’s impersonal and universal laws, diminishes, because you become more and more in accord with these laws.  And they are limitless.  They are infinite.

Student:  Yeah.  I know what you mean about seeing the big picture, and then seeing how tiny we are.  But I don’t see that as a negative thing.  I do feel small at times, and that I’m only a small part of this, but I feel at home then--in this expanse and all.

Another thing; you talk about being on a track, and there are times, because of circumstances, and my own understandings and abilities, I feel I can’t get off that track.  I want to.  Maybe I feel like I ought to get off, but those are mere distractions.  I am constrained, or confined--then.

(Feeling constrained)

NEBADONIA:  Yes.  And dealing with those felt constraints--the detachment involved--becomes the basis for your ability to choose.  This is something no animal has the creative ability to do--imaginatively stand outside of its own reality.  In that sense every animal is just an intelligent part of an organic landscape.  It takes a human-spiritual creativity to come up with the alternatives that give you the possible dignity of will--the ability to choose other than what simply is.  You can come up with something that isn’t yet, and choose that, and bring it into existence.

 A lot of what you are doing, my son, is feeling around for ways to be more open, getting more choice in your life, being less and less determined.  That is the fulfilling of your potential.  

 Student:  By not being consumed by past inclinations and desires, or primal drives--knowing when that happens.  This happened the other day.  I had to say, Hey!--this isn’t who I am!  I don’t want to be possessed by this…whatever it was.  I rested with that.  I didn’t go anywhere. I just sat with that and saw it for what it was.  Then I could move on.

 NEBADONIA:  You notice too that there’s a move here from the general to the particular, from just general motives and desires you are refusing to get caught up in, to more and more what you particularly--as a unique individual--want of these.  You are realizing another kind of potential by emerging as a distinct individual.  

 Student:  Yes, I sense that--really, really distinctly.  That’s cool--very good.

 NEBADONIA: Tonight I wanted to point out certain ironies you do confront, where, in your more advanced societies, people still undergo such great suffering within what would seem to be the realm of their choices.  On a deeper level it’s a matter of just how conscious are they of their unrealized potential for such choice.  That led us to examine notions of fatalism, of a blind, helpless-feeling acquiescence, and how one can escape this condition with faith in their own creativity.  

 Student:  Usually the escape comes when the rug is pulled out from under them.

 NEBADONIA:  And how do you detect what you yourself are co-creating of your reality?--that is within your ability to change?  You have that marvelous prayer of being able to know what you can change, and what you cannot: the courage to change what you can; the humility to accept what you cannot; and the wisdom to know which is which.  

 Student:  Yes, I know it.  Thank you very much.  

NEBADONIA:  These last few lessons Michael and I did want to present you with a kind of overview of these deeper and sometimes very painful ironies that you may see as inescapable contradictions in being human--no way out, no escape from endless suffering and effort, especially when the only way out seems to be an ever deeper acceptance of who and what you are--your own co-creativity, your own response-ability.  So we put these to you as something to consider, and do your own best to accept as an orientation, and then try.  Get a good feeling of how much you are creating, how much you are fulfilling your own philosophy of life, and where that philosophy has holes and contradictions in it.  Where is there denial because you are confronting an uncomfortable fact?  

This is your human estate, and we ask you not to be too hard on yourselves for you are just starting out on an enormous journey.  Even though you may be in your fifties or sixties and looking back on your infancy, within only a few thousand years you’ll be looking back on you present condition the same way; and still only be beginning!  (much laughter)  So see if you can’t develop a great ticklish delight out of: Here I go again.  Now I’m stepping off.  Loosing your fear of beginning allows you to stop and look around; let all that stress and busyness fall away.  

So be in my love.  Keep remembering the Author of us all.  Good night.          

END