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Nebadonia - Dealing with Ideals - Enforced Meditation - Feb 16, 2009 - Marin TM

Dear Mother Spirit and Michael, Tonight as we gather together to hear your words of encouragement, and assurance, and insight, we ask you to help us feel your presence here among us, and inside each one of us. We give you full permission to make yourselves known to us, tonight and all through our days to come. Tonight we are very righteously humble in the face of really great economic difficulties all through our society. Even if we ourselves feel somewhat secure, we can feel our hearts going out to those who are deeply troubled. And so we ask you to help us pray--if you will--help us find a way of asking for help, and then being open to that greater wisdom you help us find--even the exact thoughts from the presence of God within us, ever pointing the way to take our next step.

We thank you for reminding us that this is always an option, and a wonderful option--just to ask our Father what we need to do next, and then listen, and then do it--however many times a day we feel the need. Help us find the courage to break out of our old, deeply worn and mind-numbing habits to embrace this new day ever upon us. This we ask in the name of both of you, our dear spiritual parents. Amen.

NEBADONIA: Good evening, dear ones, this is your mother, Nebadonia. Tonight I hear your calls for help, your heartfelt prayers, and I respond joyfully. This is your precious gift to me, this coming to Michael and me and asking for our help, asking to feel our companionship in these intrinsically lonely times of hard decisions to make. You can feel us within you through the strength and the power and even the glory of our spiritual presences augmenting your own deep spiritual natures. For this is what you need to come back to as often as it occurs to you, or as often as it is impressed upon you: come back to your home base.

Be aware of your spiritual nature, your creative nature, forming a partnership with all of creation itself. Be aware of the creative decisions you’ve made throughout your life, all those choices that helped you get to where you are now. Here at your home base you can feel the living power of this absolute reality you are, in balance with all of that out there. Breathe deeply and feel your heart beating all by itself. Feel the life-force of God coursing through your body. Gain a deep humility for the enormity of this gift that you are, both for yourself and for Him.

You have a rather cynical saying that nothing is free, yet, dear children, for each one of you, this whole universe is free. Your life is a gift. You truly did not ask for it. You were presented with an enormous objective situation, much of which is unchangeable or not amenable to your will. So there is such a power of realization and acceptance in your ability to recognize what’s there and then choose to accept it deeply within where you can work with it. Contrary-wise, there is such a terrible loss of willpower and freedom in denial by stubbornly refusing to acknowledge or accept something that’s right in front of your nose, or deep in your heart.

For quite a long time now you’ve realized the importance of attitude, so once again let me give you the Urantia book definition. We talk about life being not only what is inside of you--this living physical body you have that’s so wonderfully minded--we also talk about life as being more between the organism and its environment, your relationship to all that out there. Think of attitude as your willingness and your ability to relate to this other. Most of your understanding of attitude focuses on the willingness part, the freewill part, your choosing to relate with all your human fellows; to be as Michael and I tease you to be--that cheerful, supportive person you yourself would love to meet. This is putting your will into your relationships, to welcome and to enjoy them, to know with a deep faith that this is what fills your soul.

But what about the ability part, your ability to relate to reality? We refer to you often enough as beings of enormous, even eternal potential with only a very few short years of actuality. But the realization of potential is ability, and this is definitely part of your soul and your character. Those things you have learned to do, you can do again; you now have a discrete ability through living experience. This is such a critical part of your attitude, not only your willingness and your desire, your longing to relate to others, but your ability to do so.

I think you can see where I’m going with this, how this is tied in to your ability to relate to your own soul, your own life’s experience--especially as your Father Fragment enables you to see yourself as He sees you. If through meditation you can bring your soul more into consciousness, you can literally be more soulful for others; you can demonstrate more character. With this ability to be more deeply your enduring self, the willingness part can come into play. As Michael said last time, the beaming of love--a willful and deliberate well-wishing towards others--this willingness enables you to see their personality and character more clearly, and reflect it back to them. What a gift for both of you. Beaming love enables you to fearlessly be who you are and let your soul come forth. The immediate reward of this marvelous attitude towards others is that it gives you them--not just your idea of who they are, or who you think they need to be for you, but who they are in and of themselves--equally unique creations of God. This is a marvelous attitude when you have this ability, when you realize this potential, when you actualize and bring into concrete existence real, loving events which your heart longs to do and your soul wishes to share.

This is especially important in these hard times you are facing as a society. This is the origin, the dynamic wellspring--if you will--of sharing and helping to take care of each other, of meeting those needful eyes longing for love and acknowledgement; and being there for them. This is where it comes from and each of you has this wellspring within you. It’s part of your personality. It’s part of the creativity you share with your Creator--this gift of God’s, this upwelling of creative power and love within you. Just as He gives of himself to support your life, so you too can give of yourself to help support others. In hard times this is the glue that holds societies and communities together. You do realize with a kind of tragic irony that it often takes hard times to bring this out and give people an excuse to be good to each other. But from Michael’s and my viewpoint, there’s always more than enough hardship and suffering to share.

Once before when the question of the decimation of the human race came up, Michael and I could only answer: Look around!--you’re in the middle of it! You don’t need things to get any worse in order to feel the need to get better in your attitude and your relationship to those who could use your help.

Last time Michael spoke of love being essentially a power, a divine force in the cosmos bringing and holding personal beings together. And as a living power cannot be held still or captured, cannot be possessed, love only exists in the very use of it. It is true that you can best realize God’s unfathomable love for you by feeling it and then giving it away. Use all you can by passing it on. However tiny it might seem by comparison to Him, it is what you can do. It is a gift of your self, a self-forgetting in the face of another person’s need. In a highly materialistic society, it is oftentimes the emergencies of accidents with airplanes and cars which call people to realize this essential human bond is the most precious of things.

Michael also spoke of getting behind the curve, if you will, by needing to be prompted to be spiritual. I suggest joyfully and consistently returning to your home base in spirit and deeply resting there in stillness. Open your mind and your soul to take in the power of God’s love for you. This is how you get present. This is how your understanding insight can give you some foresight, how you can plan and provide. This is how you can develop a generosity of spirit that enables you to answer the call for help. Over and over again you give yourself away in self forgetfulness. Then once more you pop back up again, back in your home base, back with being with yourself and your Father, happy and snug, aware that, however ungraspable you may be to yourself, my dear children, you can know that you absolutely are. You can have faith that, from our point of view anyway, you are moment to moment absolutely complete just as you are.

(Completion)

As we see you there is nothing missing. You are a personal being created by God, growing a soul with His help, facing out on eternity in a nigh infinite universe. What more could you possibly need?--because here it comes. It’s all in motion, and so you dance with it. You feel the love going through you from its source, and you share this. You see it light up the eyes of those who look to you. Now you know the two of you are real. The two of you are here for each other, and God’s gift of this kind of sharing has no equal. Eyes meeting the response of eyes: that’s the reward of good attitude. That’s the having that adds to your soul, and this is what is most needed now.

Now you can begin to understand what Michael and I mean when we say that social/political evolution is inexorable. There’s no stopping for long anywhere along the way. Economic necessity will bring about social change, yet only a deep spiritual understanding can see the love in this necessity. Only understanding can see this as God’s gift that keeps you grounded in the real nitty-gritty of your lives. It’s up to you to welcome this. It’s up to you to exercise your wisdom in the hard choices that come upon you. So welcome the moments that require you to be creative, that demand you be response-able. They call to you to forget yourself and be generous with all you have because your brothers’ and sisters’ need is greater. It all leads to a deep joy of sharing.

Do not misunderstand us. We do not wish disasters to fall upon our children so they may be more loving to each other. Even in the next Morontia phases of your lives, my children, there will always be a balance between what is required of you, and what you choose to respond to. This interplay between what is given and what is chosen is what really creates your life. It’s the fundamental condition that keeps you going through eternity, and it’s Michael’s Spirit of Truth that orients you to this endless discovery.

(Real consequences)

You have the potential for free will, and it’s God’s gift that there are real consequences to your choices--or inability to choose. This is the stuff of reality, the real stuff of your life, and it is captured forever in your soul. So be not afraid. Get ahead of the curve. Reach out with love and happiness and joy to embrace your fellows before you are pushed to it. This is your power and it can indeed be your glory. Michael and I wish you well. So take the time out to feel his peace. Return to your home base and be in his peace, and let it heal you. Feel my love and my presence within you, and take time out--from time to time--to say hello. Just acknowledge me in your life and I can be here for you--consciously.

Now if you have any comments or questions this evening, Michael and I are right here.

Student: Mother, both you and Father Michael have said every once in a while that our Heavenly Father keeps our heart beating. Is that literally or figuratively?

(Literal and figurative; direct and relative)

NEBADONIA: Yes, my son: it’s both. It’s literally true insofar as God is life. In an existential way, He was the essence of human life before it existed. He is the essence that precedes existence and everything that is. Everything you can be aware of is created, right down to the taste of a strawberry or the feeling of five o’clock in the morning. He created your personality and this is a living, spiritual reality, a unique personhood that is given the means by which to experience life, to relate with that which is other than her or him--a whole physical universe teeming with other unique individuals.

It is also figuratively/symbolically true in the sense of the meaning you can derive just from feeling your heart beating. It’s symbolical insofar as your personality is not your heart; it’s beating is a possession of yours. Feeling your heart beating can give you this meaning of possessing life. You can extend this further and imagine, and get a feeling for, what it means that this life is eternal. This present moment, this now with you in it, need never end--ever, ever, ever. (Mother chuckles) I know this quite beyond your ability to grasp fully yet, but the humility that this notion of an ungraspable eternity brings about is a kind of symbolic reality that does point at something transcendent and real. So resting in your home base and feeling your heart beating, my son, can have this transcendent figurative value and reassure you are God’s child. You really are here; you’re no mere projection, even His. Does that answer the question?

Student: Pretty much so, Mother. I just got an exciting and interesting glimpse into our Heavenly Father--a tiny glimpse.

NEBADONIA: All of your experiences, my son, have these qualities of being both literal and figurative. You know things in and of themselves, all by themselves, very literally, very directly, yet at the same time you know them in relationship to everything else. This is the figurative/meaningful relationship of things and your inner recognition of those relationships. These two modalities go playing leapfrog over each other, each adding to the other.

Student: I know I know things by comparison with other things, differentiating one thing from another.

NEBADONIA: Also, my son, you have direct perception and the inner intuition I augment. This is an innate ability of yours to recognize and relate to something directly, because if you’ve been paying attention so far in your life, you’ve noticed that no two things are exactly alike. (No, they’re not) With this realization you can have such a wonderful familiarity and companionship even with stuff, with those things--those tools perhaps--you’ve used for years and years that seem to have acquired their own personal character. That’s the direct relationship to the uniqueness of each thing you can have. That’s the wonderful ability to recognize the hallmark of God’s creativity in everything, not only personalities, but in every grain of sand on a beach, every snowflake that is somewhat unique and like no other.

So we tease you to imagine this heart of yours beating forever, and make that part of your understanding.

Student: Hello, Mother. I have a question about something I’ve never asked about, but it’s still on my mind. It has to do with organized religion and the benefits of working in churches so you can have opportunities for ministry and expressing yourself by loving others, versus not doing so and being out in the world free and on your own, expressing your spirituality just spontaneously as you pass by. Can you update what the Urantia book says about organized religion? It makes a lot of warnings, things that might still apply but are probably getting out of date quite a bit. What are the benefits of the symbolism you mentioned before? I mean in churches you have symbols, you have rituals, you have rich sacred arts and music, and you don’t get that if you go on your own--if you go it alone without participating in traditions. So I wonder if you have something to say for us on that, that’s kind of very up to date in our postmodern era.

(Personal religion; shared religion)

NEBADONIA: Yes, my son. My most direct advice is to experience both. You’ve found a nice distinction between what you do on your own initiative out in the world, and what you do when a number of persons to get together to, ideally, share their spirituality. Yet the real or authentically divine nature of spiritual sharing can take place in both realms.

The religious experience--the relationship of the individual to God, is somewhat independent of the church experience insofar as church experience can be everything from the deepest spiritual exchange of ultimate values to, at the other end of the spectrum, a mere social event that can even be quite un-spiritual in the sense of promulgating fundamentalist beliefs that the group is the sole possessor of truth. And sometimes even the in the same organization you can have both types of individuals represented.

The most deadening effect of the socialization of the religious experience is a kind of laziness and smug satisfaction, a falling back from the sharp edge of the present moment, of really being open to God’s liberating presence within you, wonderfully cutting away false identifications. It’s falling back into identifying with dogma, the lazy attempt to encapsulate and hold exclusive in philosophical and theological arguments, threats and withholding oneself, His living power of love.

Dogma is a just another form of psychological denial, denying the essential living natures of truth and love by trying to capture them and hold them still and unchallenging. It’s wholly unnecessary. When the challenge of progress seems too great, you can take a break and rest in your God-given absolute existence, your moment to moment completeness, for this is real and of inclusive spirit. Dogma invariably leads to exclusiveness; that’s its psychological purpose--to prop up shaky egos fearful of others. What every church, every truly spiritual organization needs is for all of its members to have that other part of their life, that going out there--as you mentioned--and spontaneously relating to people who live outside their specific context. Then when they get together again on Sunday morning, this is what each has to offer the others, their whole week of being out there confronting and dealing with the glory of God’s creation of infinite personal variety.

So I see these two phases as very complementary. As you point out, the organization and socialization of religious experience has evolved over the years enormous traditions. This is that cultural conditioning we’ve given so many lessons on, that at the same time these traditions give meaning and value to your life, they also condition your free will. If they are not consciously seen as being limited human creations, but are mistakenly taken for the sole word of God: that is fundamentalism. That is taking human traditions and saying they are so fundamentally God’s only word one needn’t go outside and relate with all the others out there, and their different viewpoints. And that is an attitude: the unwillingness and inability to relate.

So consider a good, healthy and living balance of these different, shall we say, phases or modes of religious experience: what you share with God, alone, and what you share will all others. You have your own unique personality and therefore your own unique relationship to God. In this you can share that which you cannot share with another human being just because you both are unique. There is that within you and your life experience you cannot hope to express in thought or words, but you can share directly with God, and with Michael and me. You can also have all the shared spiritual life with your fellows in organized communion. So I would say: enjoy a good balance of both. Those individuals out there totally alone and by themselves can be missing all the rich traditions of thousands of years of evolving world culture. It’s good for your soul to have both.

Student: Yes, Mother, tradition can be seen as blinders to the here and now, like living in the past, because traditions originate from the past and color our perceptions of what is here and now--our own experience of God’s presence. I’ve got a lot of poetry and writing on this topic, and even though I love and embrace Judaism and Christianity, and enjoy the Catholic liturgy, my favorite part of each service is when we say hello to each other--that direct human contact.

What I’ve been kind-of experiencing and grappling with over the past couple of weeks is how sometimes my description of how I think things should be in my life, and the life of others, gets in the way of settling into just allowing and opening up to whatever--whatever comes forth. There is always this fear--and I brought this up at another gathering I participate in--that because I’m not living how I think I should live, I’m living erroneously.

But obviously that’s not true, because as you said earlier, you see us as absolutely complete and whole and perfect. So if I allow myself just to be still and to rest, and attach no story to my life, then it’s beyond description how my life is to be--and is--as of this moment. So I was noticing how lately with the circumstances in my life, I want to make decisions from this home base in the sense of being self-forgetful, getting out of the way and seeing what comes forth. At times my ego--for lack of another word--gets really impatient and wants to know what I’m to do. There’s the fear of uncertainty. I’m tired of uncertainty, but at the same time I know that anything of real value originates from this home base of authenticity, of oneness with this truth.

NEBADONIA: Yes, my son, I seem to be confronted tonight with a lot of…(Mother chuckles)…alternatives that I can only reflect back to you as living balances of equally valid understandings. Let me offer you this tool to deal with your ideals, because that’s essentially what I see you wrestling with. You have ideals of how you think your life ought to be lived better, and so it might help to break these down in terms of time. Most of these ideals are definitely directed towards the future--i.e. living better--and, from my point of view, are wonderful. These stories, these ideals you imagine are necessary and useful for you to get a taste of, and kind-of feel your way along towards, growing more perfect, even as God is perfect. But this is very different from being complete, in the sense of nothing missing. Growing more perfect relates more to increasing inner unity and correspondingly enhanced personality/soul function.

Yet in your meditation another ideal raises its head, and that is your notion of being evermore present, what you philosophically call imminence--being im-mediate--no intermediaries--not even ideals--between you and the present moment. This is often considered to be contra-distinct from transcendence, in your case your story/thinking of a more ideal life--how you try to transcend your present condition by feeling these ideals, to know which way to go. You’ve decided to let everything go so you can be evermore present, evermore aware of what you already are as a creation of God’s, and just rest content with that and make decisions from there. Now can you see how, as you explained your dilemma, you felt the need to throw away your ideals of how you think life should be--those stories you mentioned that were making you feel in error--in order to experience how great life already is?

I would say: make sure you keep both. They are not mutually exclusive--the immediate real and the transcendent ideal; maturity brings them together. There is a resolution, if you can feel-along what I have to say. As you become more immediate and present, you can feel yourself becoming larger and larger inside; your free-will spiritual home base continues to grow. It’s another way of saying that as you become more highly conscious here and now, you are transcending those limitations of conditioning out of the past; you are approaching a spontaneous creativity that is not so rigidly bound by the past. You can become aware that those traditions and their ideals that you rightfully value so much are not an end-all and be-all in themselves, but are temporary and provisional and will also be transcended in time. You can even intuit with humility the enormity that you have yet to encounter, and embrace, and learn in an endless future. So the more immediate you become by relaxing, and being still and more highly conscious, (Mother chuckles) this is in itself a kind of transcendence, a realized ideal.

Student: Yeah! Thank you for that, because I feel like I need to make choices, but not from what I made in the past. It’s like you keep on asking, what do I really want, and so it’s like paring me down to bare necessities, to bare essence: what is driving me; what is making the choice? Is it like the need for money, the need to pay bills, the need to do this or that? Or is it something deeper than that? I’m tired of the program that was created by man. I want it to be, in a sense, created from God, from truth, from reality. And so I’m just kind-of allowing that to kind-of percolate and see where that goes, you know? For all I know I could become homeless, or I could have someone share my place with me; but nothing seems to have come up. So I’m kind-of sitting with it all. So. So thank you.

NEBADONIA: You are very welcome, my son. I congratulate on finding that--just sitting. (Mother chuckles) That’s what we’ve been teaching now for many years in these particular sessions, and for many, many millennia to the human races. (Mother chuckles again)

(Enforced meditation--worry and anxiety)

Yet as I said last time, a lot of folks only experience meditation when they are literally being held still consumed with worry and anxiety--real pain and suffering. So they have that association. But to see and embrace the beauty and the need for necessity, to understand what a gift of God’s this nitty-gritty world of yours is that makes every moment in time unique. Because there is something coming down here that never happened before: and it will never happen again.

This is largely what you call the physical or the material plane. This whole universe is in motion and actually growing in both material and personal beings, like a balloon that keeps getting larger and more Supremely dense forever. This is what you are involved in. It is a great comfort to keep in mind so things like money do not totally capture you. Keep in mind that money is a useful tool, a means of exchange and measurement, but only a quantitative evaluation of real qualities like the food you eat or the home you make of your house. That’s the real stuff.

So congratulations, my son: keep sitting. I can only say that because I do know (Mother chuckles) you will get up and go out into the world refreshed, and enjoy doing things as well. You certainly don’t want to grow solid into one spot, and you never have. Be in my love.

Student: Good evening, Mother, when you were speaking earlier, you were talking about reaching out and loving one another, that first requires an attitude--the willingness and then after that the ability. I have some sense of what that means, and that’s the soul’s ability to go with what we’ve learned, and also a sense that it’s the native ability of every person. I wonder if you could expand on it so I can get a better sense, a better feeling of what that is, so that I can go out and really practice it.

(Attitude again)

NEBADONIA: Yes, my daughter, I was talking about attitude as a willingness and an ability to relate--what we’ve talked about before as an ability to respond to a situation, to another person--a response-ability. Now an ability is something that you learn. You might say it’s soul-stuff. (Yes) You are born with potential and even that varies enormously from person to person in terms of heredity and innate talents and so forth. But you yourself--by living experience, by trial and error, by understanding what you are doing--you grow your ability to respond adequately. Ability is something you acquire. It becomes part of your soul, part of what you have done.

Michael and I have talked about genuine accomplishment. It is not just some ego-centered, self-infatuation with--you know--Look what I’ve done! But there is something there (Mother chuckles) that wasn’t there before. It might be a building, or machinery. It could be a living plant. It could be a living child. This is what we mean by ability, this facility that you earn by genuine accomplishment. Does that help you understand what we mean by ability and how this portion of attitude is not just given?

You have to watch you don’t get too impatient, for you weren’t born with this ability to relate to others. Your Urantia book gives some great stories about how with very primitive peoples, their ability to relate is only with respect to a very small family or tribe. Their attitude toward all the rest of the human beings out there in the other, surrounding tribes; they considered them simply either predator or prey to be feared or conquered.

Student: So in a sense it’s the willing attitude when one chooses to act on a desire to relate--by using one’s will and one’s past abilities to reach out and do something in relationship with another person.

Student: And that can be any way you would choose to do it. But it’s what you talked about before: you make the choice to make the effort.

NEBADONIA: Yes, this is the willingness part. (Yes) Because you can have had an ability to relate with others, yet as the result of some tragedy or deep scarring of your soul, you lose the willingness to do so. People withdraw. They lose their willingness to relate to others and sometimes, when they are forced into close proximity with each other, they respond with anger, cruelty, belligerence, and violence.

So part of a good attitude is your free will choice, and part is an acquirement, something you have to learn, you weren’t born with, either as an individual or as a race. This is the growth of culture and civilization, of how people learn to have this good attitude towards each other and share the delight.

Student: So part of it is based on our natural endowment and having our personality. Today we were reading about Jesus’ final admonitions to the Apostles, in the Urantia book. He was counseling them on their ability. He was asking them to be mindful of the way in which they related to other people, and telling them how to make that effort.

Student: Right: and then the willingness comes in as the willingness to work with that.

NEBADONIA: It’s the desire in you to get this ability to respond to others, rather than, shall we say, shutting them out, or trying to annihilate them so you don’t have to deal with them. You can go too far. You can say, as some folks do, that attitude is everything. It’s not quite that. Nothing is everything--if you will. There is a whole objective universe outside your attitude. But it’s a big thing. (Mother chuckles) We often talk about open mindedness and this is another one of those abilities you learn--how to meet folks and take them in. (Right) I think one of the first lessons I gave was to consider not holding a screen out there to let only certain types in, or projecting some very narrow attitude of how you want to be taken. If you get the spiritual courage and ability to drop that, because these are only slightly sophisticated instinctive animal reactions, then you get the reward. You get to fill your soul with all these marvelous, marvelous beings about you. (Right)

Michael last time pointed out the real essence here is one of individual freedom, not getting lost and terribly aggressive with notions of society, or political party, or even religion. It’s the individual person there, that living person, and what personal freedom and responsibility their society and politics and religion encourage them to develop. That’s that marvelous thing where the teacher looks forward to his student outgrowing him.

So keep nourishing that good attitude, my daughter. Keep feeding it like the wonderful living thing it is. And then that’s the reward, is it not? That’s the wonderful attitude (Mother chuckles) --if you have it--you can tease others into.

NEBADONIA: One of your kind-of make-do philosophers said that, if you love someone you’ll tease. (student chuckles) You’re kind-of dangling possibilities out in front of each other--you know--calling to the best in each other. Michael’s description of love last time was just same as God’s for you, just wishing the best for another and teasing them into being a partner in their own perfection. Carry on, and be in my love.

(Saving grace)

Tonight, my children, I hope I was somewhat successful in pointing out a certain saving grace in hard times, this notion of growing beyond the necessity for hard times to give you an excuse to be good to each other. See the necessity of the hard physical needs in human life as a gift that keeps you grounded, that invites you to have some appreciation for each unique moment’s situation. Realize what part of the situation you are, and what you need to do for both yourself and others.

It is our delight as well as yours, my dear children, the way you do reach out to each other in all times, the way you do heal and comfort and sustain each other. This is the very stuff of soul and spirit. This is getting the ability to realize your God-given potential for goodness. We have no fear for you, so call to us. Exercise your faith so you may have no fear for yourself. Imagine, then get a feeling for, this life of yours being eternal. And be in my love. Good evening.