The Adventure of Being Human: The Holy Spirit Speaks: More Lessons on Soulful Living from the Heart of the Urantia Revelation
190
The Adventure of Being Human: The Holy Spirit Speaks: More Lessons on Soulful Living from the Heart of the Urantia Revelation
190Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781579830359 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Origin Press CA |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2015 |
| Pages: | 190 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Adventure of Being Human II: Mother Spirit Speaks
More Lessons on Soulful Living from the Heart of the Urantia Revelation
By Jerry Lane
Origin Press
Copyright © 2015 Jerry LaneAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57983-035-9
CHAPTER 1
Part I:
Epigrams and Short Teachings
* * *
Spend a little time in stillness
Every morning, if you can, remind yourself of spiritual dimensions in your life by spending a little time in stillness. Then all through the day stay close to us, and close to your own deeper self. Constantly relax and open inward and outward, cherishing this transcendent peace you can feel right in the midst of your most hectic activities, your most scary challenges.
Relax with me now
Just relax and let my presence swell in your minds. Take a deep breath. Let it go. Remember I am all around you — spatially. You can best feel me by relaxing your attention and letting it turn everywhere outward. This kind of tingling, cushion-soft pressure, this fundamental consciousness of being conscious and alive: This is me. I am with you, right in your bodies and permeating all this inner space you feel as your mind.
The universe continuously blossoms into now
In a very fundamental way, God does not have to repeat himself. We've likened him to a fountain right out in the middle of the air, with his whole universe continuously blossoming into now. So, think of reality as only roughly "half-continuing." The other half is each moment's new permutation.
Wisdom applies experience to the present moment
Knowledge refers to specific experiences in which you've acquired this or that fact. But wisdom is what enables you to apply all of this hard-earned experience to the present moment. It is the mind-spirit of wisdom that gives a growing depth of meaning to what you are experiencing, moment-by-moment. It feeds and informs your perceptions, and enables you to make sense of the enormous complexity you are taking in each second.
Strive, through love, to be free
You shall strive, by loving, towards the truth, to be free. Then glory in the fact that only eternity itself can fully disclose the nature of truth, which is God himself. This is another meaning of eternity, my children. This is the path. This is the forever-quest.
Your intention is crucial
In the realm of spirit, intention is almost everything. Some of your ancient human religious texts recognize this by saying "The intention is yours, the results are God's." This is so important because you cannot see the full consequences of your actions. But if your intent to love is great, if you deeply and thoroughly and passionately desire to help this friend, this child, this parent, even this total stranger in front of you, this is a reality, my children. And there is also in this other person a spiritual presence receptive to your intention. They may or may not be open to this, but your own openness in this situation, your receiving their full spiritual reality without judgment or prejudice — it is this attitude on your part that invites them to do the same.
Your soul is your truest spiritual record
You need never fear because, even though your memories fade, your soul is being held sacrosanct by an individualized presence of God. This is what your soul is: the true spiritual record of who and what you are, and what you have experienced.
Growing your soul is your fundamental purpose
Your soul is the fundamental purpose for your being an experiencing, personal being. All aspects of you are tied together in a personal unity that is itself growing. You call it character. You call it confidence. You call it faith. Isn't it marvelous that there is a reality that you can know for certain, even in this first phase of your eternal life?
Those you have loved are your eternal wealth
Think of the people you have known, my children, who are now contained in your soul at a depth that is far, far beyond even your wonderful memories of who they were and what you shared with them. They are your eternal wealth. Just as you can have the sure knowledge, deep in your heart, that your life is a priceless gift of God's, so too are their lives there within you in your soul. And so too, they have you in their souls.
This whole universe is free
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. Upon birth you were presented with an enormous objective situation, much of which is not amenable to your will. Yet there is such power in your ability to recognize what's there, and then choose to accept it deeply within, where you can work with it. You can unify ever-greater reaches of cosmic reality You are experiential beings and your personalities must, step by step, piece by piece, bit by bit, learn how to do this unifying through ever-expanding living experience. The possibility that through your unending individual experiences you can unify ever-greater reaches of cosmic reality is what you call eternal life.
God puts your future in your own hands
Ironic as it might seem, there is no more secure basis upon which to rest your future than your conscious decisions. This possibility was and continues to be God's choice: to put so much of your future in your own hands. There is no safer and more just repository of this potential but in the human hands of those who stand to benefit so much by it.
Each moment is real and unique in eternity
For each moment's particularity is real. In each moment of time your very concrete existence provides the bottomless detail of your temporal uniqueness. This moment has never happened before, and it will never happen again in all eternity. And so your soul grows apace towards its eternal co-author, a fragment of God himself.
It is always you doing the deed
When all is said and done, my children, you are a unique, creative personality. When all things are taken into consideration — even what you feel to be our answers to your prayers — still it is you stepping off. It is you doing the deed. It is you who needs to stay open, bright-eyed, and open-minded to the results.
Realize God's love by giving it away
Love is essentially a power, a divine force in the cosmos bringing and holding personal beings together. As a dynamic power it cannot be held still, captured, or possessed. Love only exists in the very use of it. You can best realize God's unfathomable love for you by feeling it and giving it away.
The pure experience of who and what you are
It was a marvelous creation of your philosophers and religious folks of the past to come up with something called meditation. Think of what it means to deliberately do nothing; or, if you will, engage in the very special activity of bringing a halt to this drive, this incessant hunger for worldly experience. Consider what it entails to purely experience who and what you already are, by being still.
We don't compare you to each other
We do enjoy this relationship with our children, though it staggers your human imaginations to wonder about how many children we have. We ask you to have faith that, as our Universal Father is no respecter of persons, so too Michael and I see and experience each one of you as an unbounded, unique being. We don't compare individuals with each other. True, you're all roughly in the basket called humanity, but you also share this status with those on millions of other evolutionary worlds.
Needed: a profound change in human relationships
Right now the human race on Urantia lacks for nothing else in total. There is enough land and food, enough shelter and other resources for all. Only a profound change in human relationships can reap an immediate reward by lessening the offensive and defensive preparations for and against war and crime that still impoverish humankind.
We await your prayers
There is what you might call a principle of privacy within the spiritual realm. Spirit beings do not go where they are not invited. This means that we self-limit ourselves to your choosing through the dignity of your will. This is why prayer is necessary if you wish our help. You have to sincerely ask for our help before we can assist you.
Our open family secret
Though you can intellectually think of reality as a single happening, which it is, only God himself fully experiences it as such. For we lesser beings it is a highly complex, I should say, an infinitely complex happening. This single reality includes millions of galaxies, trillions of inhabited worlds, each with their billions of human-level beings, and then a whole hierarchy of personal beings forming an unbroken chain between them and God, their Father. This is all actually happening right now.
Your ultimate destiny
That day will come when you will have undergone a transformation toward perfection that is enormously inconceivable for you now. I know you trust that this is not in any way, shape, or form a put-down to say: you cannot begin to imagine the kind of beings you will become when you have not thousands, but millions of years of experience behind you on thousands of different worlds, architectural spheres and natural planets at every stage of development. Someday you will be on Paradise, face-to-face with your Father.
CHAPTER 2Part II:
Selected Lessons
* * *
Every morning, if you can, remind yourself of these great spiritual dimensions in your life by spending a little time in stillness. Then all through the day stay close to us, and close to your own deeper self. Constantly relax and open inward and outward, cherishing this transcendent peace you can feel right in the midst of your most hectic activities, your most scary challenges.
LESSON 1
* * *
Rest Deeply in Your Home Base of Spirit
Greetings, my children. Michael and I are looking forward to some enormous changes coming about on Urantia, largely due to more and more folks just like you becoming aware of a spiritual dimension in their lives. You're learning how to tune into your interior life; you are gaining the courage to follow where it leads. You're discovering the truth that spirit — true authority — never compels. Instead, it only suggests and coaxes you to extend your faith out in front of you. Such a faith is much like feeling your way in the dark — always on the edge of the unknown. Yet, you find a supreme security as you eventually realize that your indwelling spirit is your God-intended home.
We've talked a lot about this security that you can feel within yourself. It's a feeling that comes by relaxing and being open, trusting there is more to you than what you can be momentarily aware of. Trusting in this way requires faith and courage. But again, because you have such faith, you reach out and feel into your experience — however blindly, however unknowingly — while asking yourself: what is the next step that fulfills God's will?
Feel your way to God's will
We know that some of you balk at the whole notion of God's will. It seems to chafe your notions of freedom, your own free will, your need to stand on your own two feet and make your decisions by yourself. But there is really no contradiction here, my children. Feeling for God's will is that extension of faith that tells you something is much greater than yourself: that God exists, and that his knowledge and understanding is gigantic beyond any measuring. The essence of his will is love, wanting what is best for you from his perspective. And so, in reaching for his will, you are simply reaching for what is absolutely ideal for yourselves. This is the way to go. These urges and intuitions are the things to try, however impossible, or however difficult they may seem initially.
Real faith will feed your intuition. It gives you those inklings that you may not yet be able to fully perceive — yet they just feel right. So you look for them. However divided you may feel against yourself inside, and however much, or little, you are able to do these things that you feel are right, we invite you to keep feeling and accept what your spirit, what your soul, what your heart tells you is this greater way. For this is God's way.
Trust that your planet is slowly evolving
The whole universe of time and space that God experiences as the Supreme Being is absolutely evolving. It is constantly building on all that has gone before, and God is forever coming up with something new to add to his universal oversoul of evolution; and this very same newness is how God leads you.
You can have absolute faith and trust in this general trend of God's created universe, for this extends right down to the local universes, the constellations, the local systems, the individual planets. This is true even on your world, Urantia, having suffered the misfortunes of betrayed trust and mismanagement that it has in the past [i.e., the Lucifer Rebellion, - Ed.], plus the rather catastrophic failure of your Material Son and Daughter to fully biologically up-step the human races. In spite of these catastrophes, you can still trust that the planet is evolving. The planetary civilization of all the different cultures and races is growing.
There has always been a "world soul," a spiritual summation of mankind's experiences, but the human perception of this reality, individual by individual, is only slowly growing. Now you are in a technological age that allows for a physical parallel of electronic technology to assist the evolving spiritual family and the individual souls that have always been here. Merging these two are phases of planetary development that every evolving world goes through. For example, your technology now enables the whole world to tune into those terrible incidents of enormous genocide that still happen occasionally.
More and more the world is losing its blind eye and turning its curiosity and its compassion to those who need it so desperately. On the other hand, your mass media is rather sensationalistic and has as yet found no way to adequately portray the enormous amount of goodness in peoples' lives too, the amount of love and sacrifice and support that people give each other day to day. This is the actual glue that holds human society together.
Return always to your home base in spirit
Again, you always have a home base you can return to. Go here so you can tap into and feel directly the goodness within the spiritual realm. Feel Michael's and my love for you, and know this is extended to and supporting every other human being who exists, whether they are aware of it or not. Feel too this enormous planetary evolution taking place and realize how every single human being, starting out from zero experience as a newborn baby, participates in this evolution. From our standpoint your planet, Urantia, is still very young, and to say that the world as a whole is still in its adolescent planetary cultural stage is not a putdown, but actually pointing at a period of enormous growth. However awkward and gangly, Urantia is growing. Your world culture is maturing. More and more people are letting go their prejudices, some of which go back hundreds and hundreds of years.
So rest deeply in your home base of spirit. Every morning, if you can, remind yourself of these great spiritual dimensions in your life by spending a little time in stillness. Then all through the day stay close to us, and close to your own deeper self. Constantly relax and open inward and outward, cherishing this transcendental peace you can feel right in the midst of your most hectic activities, your most scary challenges. In the evenings as you rest your weary bodies and so often tired minds, take comfort and joy in the soulful rewards of the day. Then bid Michael and I, and our mutual Father, a fond good night, and let it all go, confident in another bright morning.
What does truth liberate you from? Let me suggest that this liberation is from the illusion that you can possess, or that you already do possess, Truth Itself.
LESSON 2
* * *
The Liberating Power of Truth
Being your Mother Spirit, I welcome the feedback you give me, and I cherish the love in your words. I have a mother's heart that strives to be wise with my children. At times this can require what you call tough-love — which confers on you, after all, a realization of the importance of truth. You know that wonderful saying: "You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free."
What does the truth free you from?
To your modern minds another good word for truth is reality — that which is real, that which actually exists. You absolutely do exist, yet you are all striving to feel fully existent within yourselves, in your own experience. You will slowly achieve this awareness, though it may take uncountable millions of years; that's because, in regard to this "existential" dimension, my children, there is no limit. Even after you become pure spirits and leave our local universe to head out into your galactic adventure, you will still be just starting another phase of your endless existence. There are many, many steps to go before you achieve a full and final existential experience and become what is appropriately called a finaliter, a member of the Corps of the Finality.
You start out as a tiny nodule of experience, a living focal point of personality in time and space. In time you will become supremely "final" on Paradise; and even then there are six more inhabited superuniverses of galaxies to explore. You are evolutionary beings, and ceaseless growth is your very nature. Yet, as your Urantia Book assures you, and so have we: you are already existentially real in the very fact of your existence. In this one aspect you are already absolute, for your personality is a creation of God the Father. And so, as you strive for truth in order to be free, what exactly is it you are being freed from?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Adventure of Being Human II: Mother Spirit Speaks by Jerry Lane. Copyright © 2015 Jerry Lane. Excerpted by permission of Origin Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Publisher's Preface Byron Belitsos xvii
Prologue Jerry Lane xxi
Part I Epigrams and Short Teachings: Best excerpts from Mother Spirit transmissions 1
Part II Selected Lessons: Transcripts of Sessions with Mother Spirit
1 Rest Deeply in Your Home Base of Spirit 11
2 The Liberating Power of Truth 15
3 Knowing Another Soul Transforms You 19
4 This Evolving Cosmos Is Your Home 21
5 Dimensions of Being Human 25
6 Do Your Personality and Soul Reincarnate? 31
7 Your Quest for Personality Unification 37
8 Sensing Pure Spirit in Self and Others 43
9 The Treasure of Your Curiosity 49
10 The Siblinghood of Personal Beings 53
11 Feeling Spirit Makes You More Real 55
12 Learning to Thrive on Uncertainty 61
13 The Grounds for an All-encompassing Humility 65
14 Responding Well to Hard Times 69
15 Facing Adversity with Deepening Love 73
16 The Partnership of Courage and Curiosity 79
17 Asking for God's Will-Breaking Old Habits 83
18 Fulfilling Your Human Experience 87
19 A Universe of Personal Beings to Embrace 91
20 Practicing Goodness for Its Own Sake 95
Part III On the Magisterial Mission Special Dialogues with Christ Michael and Mother Spirit
The Lifting of the Planetary Quarantine 103
Preparing the Way for a New Divine Incarnation 107
The Planetary Mission of Mercy 109
The Essence of Mercy 111
Part IV Appendices
A Introducing The Urantia Book: A Revelation of Love and Cosmic Evolution 117
B Mother Spirit and Christ Michael: The Trinity in Time and Space 123
C A Brief History of the Teaching Mission 127
D Urantia Movement Resources 135
Glossary of Terms 139