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**SOURCE:** Rayson & Friends |
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**SOURCE:** Rayson and Friends |
R = Rayson the teacher, S = Students.
S: Well, yes, only sometimes. I want to do better. Most of the time I want to do better. R: Patience is a part of love. Is it not? S: It seems to me that it is. I set aside times for worship and in those times I try to mentally say that I love the Father and that I actually worship the Father. But I haven't any real meaning to the idea. It gives me some pleasure and satisfaction to say it, but I really don't know what I'm saying. R: Do you say it in isolation, or do you say it when you are among others? S: Well, both, but I don't say it aloud when I'm among others. R: What markers of success are you looking at? S: That is what I was going to ask you. I don't know what the markers of success are. I feel supported, full, loved, but then I don't feel that I'm doing enough. R: The feelings that you have are the markers of your success. The response of others to you is the marker of your success. S: I hear you talking about problems and travail that are blessings. I really haven't been blessed with any of those. I have everything it seems that life can offer: a loving family, very close friends, and a good relationship with God. I wonder if this is a test: no hardship? R: You have had your hardships, but the human mind is quite remarkable in that, with the passage of time, pain is forgotten in its fullest intensity. This helps to protect you, for you are a creature of flesh and blood, and if you were to continue to experience the pain of every difficulty, life would be intolerable. S2: She is expressing some of the same feelings I've been having that I am not spending enough time in worship. Yet, I feel like I have Father with me all the time. Yet I regret I'm not spending enough time alone with Him, solely with Him. And today I feel like I made a connection and a commitment during our lesson that will help me to do better at this. And I thank you very much for your lesson. R: You are most welcome. Perhaps the anxiety you experience with regard to your own spiritual growth has to do with the fact that you are looking for material signs of spiritual effectiveness. You will never see those. That is where your faith comes in. It is worship enough at the end of a long and successful life to wake up in the morning, to care for oneself, to not be a burden to others, to maintain one's health, and to be loving in one's interactions on a social level. You both do that quite well. Neither of you engage in the practice of castigating your offspring for failures of your own health or finances, nor do you spend time in regret over what may have been. Those activities would be the opposite of worship. It would not be in your best interests to conduct your worshipful lives in the same fashion as you did when you were twenty or thirty years old. My sense is that you are handling it quite well, and it may help you to know that your living example is very important to the other participants of this mission who are younger than you are. Does that help? S2: Yes, it helps, and it seems that the absence of unloving behavior is a form of worship. I think that's a beautiful thought. R: Yes, is it not paradoxical that what you perceive in the material is the negative, not the positive, and what you perceive in the spiritual is the positive, not the negative. Is that not true? (S: Yes.) Question: Along the lines of worship, I feel that worship is something that flows in and out of my life. For example, (S) and I were surfing this morning, and just to sit out there and see what God has made. And in those moments just know that He hears how grateful I am, that's worship too, isn't it? Answer: Yes, and certainly your fellowship with (S) is most worshipful. S: So I'm thinking along the lines of (S2) and (S3) who to me epitomize worship. No one could be more loved and more respected. If I could just become like them when I grow up, I would think everything I did was right. R: Yet, you hear their doubts. It is good for you to speak your feelings along these lines, and remember, my dear, worship means doing the right thing at the right time. You were right to attend to your families' need rather than to attend Michael's party. God has no need of your food, but He needs your loving interaction with your relatives, and through that you help to spread His teachings. S: I believe that. I don't always do it, but if I could just do good always, I couldn't do any better than that. So, if I think I'm doing good, I feel OK about what I do. I seem to have a pretty good reality checker inside me, so if I just follow my inner promptings, I know that it will be OK. I feel like I'm getting better, and I know you know what this means. So thanks. R: You are most welcome. Question: With regard to your lesson today, these are requests for confirmation to see if I understood the lesson correctly. We worship not just in solitude, but in our communion and truck with our fellows every day? Answer: More so. Question: So, doing Father's will in relation to our brothers and sisters is a form of worship. Answer: That is absolutely correct. In fact, it is the main form of worship. Question: And as far as markers are concerned, those times when we feel most connected, (S2) and (S3)'s questions prompted this, but I've been wondering myself, too. Interesting, we're all wondering the same thing. We've all felt it. We've known that we were in loving communion with the Father. It's unmistakable. It's completely reciprocal. And, most of the time we only feel that when we're in solitary communion, worship. But now and then it seems we feel it when we're in everyday life, just regular activity, and we've made a good choice, and we've been able to do a good thing not just for someone else but to tell ourselves, or to reinforce better behavior, God's will in our own actions. Am I right? Are those markers? Are those little guideposts that say “Yes, this is the direction, follow this?” Answer: Yes, and to elaborate on that, the sense of being correct and being in communion that you experience in solitude is actually the glowing reflection of correct behavior when you are engaged in activity. However, your blunted awareness while you are active is mostly due to the fact that you have a brain and body of animal origin and that talking voice in your brain is babbling too loudly for you to be able to hear, in a sense, the rightness, the spiritual perception, that you get when you are in a quiet mode. If your actions while engaged with others were incorrect, then during your periods of solitude you most likely would experience either discomfort, pain, or a neutral feeling, rather than a sense of well being and goodness, such as you express. The evil man cannot stand his own company. Question: So, there necessarily has to be a cleansing period, I would guess. Answer: Well, it is certainly a useful reinforcement of your faith to have periods of solitude during which you can quiet the mind and perceive your own spiritual level. It is not absolutely necessarily, in the strictest sense, but there are very, very few humans on this planet who have been able to dispense with this device as an adjunct to the spiritual journey. So, the answer to your question is yes. Question: When you say worshipful activities I presume you mean service, because one can have activities which are based on error which would not be worshipful. I would think that service would be equivalent to worship or maybe even better. When I relate to others, if I try to relate to the God within them, their Thought Adjuster, I think in that case I would be approaching worship because I would be serving them. I can't say, for instance, if service is better than worship or worship is better than service because sometimes service will make me worship better and sometimes worship will make me serve better. But worship seems to me like it's more of a one on one situation where I can talk directly to the Father within me whereas when I'm serving there is a third party involved. Is that correct? Answer: There is no difference between worship and service. S: The Urantia book says there is. Answer: Well, worship in the sense of doing the will of the Father is service. As far as a third party being involved, when you interact in a social way with another being, in a loving and serving way, you extend the connection between yourself and God to that third party. Yes, that is somewhat different from a private session with the Father, but it is only a difference in degree. If one were to spend one's life in solitude reading spiritual materials and attempting through the Thought Adjuster to contact the Father, the spiritual life would be incomplete and unfulfilled because the connection to other beings is a vital part of a proper worship existence. Much confusion about worship arises from ancient times in the history of man on this planet when superstitions and fear lead to the enactment of ritual behaviors designed to appease the mysterious forces that were thought to be responsible for good luck, good weather, good health and general well being. This idea has existed to the present day in the persistent belief that worship can only be undertaken in solitude or even in a particular setting, such as a church, temple, mosque, and even in particular position, such as the kneeling position, or the prostrate position. It is unfortunate that this pigeon holing of the notion of worship has occurred, but my personal understanding of worship is that it encompasses all activities in which one extends one's link to the Father through the Thought Adjuster which has been achieved through conscious effort and freewill decision to another being or other beings in an active fashion. S: I think a lot of this is based on a frame of reference whence we take the meaning of worship as we apply it to ourselves. I was never related to a church when I was a child so I don't relate worship to any specific temple or any church or any archaic concept of worship. I just think worship as I get is straight from the Urantia Book and from Jesus' example. He did service with others and for others, but He also took time to go out on His own to be by Himself so that He could talk to the Father. I think it's very good for you to inform people that worship can be accomplished not just by oneself but also in doing service. I just wanted to bring the point up because I talk to some people who would just worship with others but not by themselves. In other words, they wouldn't go out by themselves to be alone with God. I think that both service and worship is necessary and not one at the sacrifice of the other. R: If you wish to consider them as separate activities, that is your choice. The life of Jesus, which is the example lovingly provided by Father as the model for ideal human existence, was one of unending service and was the ideal for human endeavor. Never once did Michael cease to worship Father. S: I have no qualms about that. It's just a matter of semantics. We tend to use the word worship, I do anyway, to distinguish it from service, and that when one talks directly to the Father it's not a matter of action. Service - to me - is action, whereas worship is being with the Father. In other words, it's the difference between the first person and the third person. Service is action, the third person, having to do with Infinite Spirit, whereas to me worship is the first person, being with the Father. It's an existential kind of thing. That's how I differentiate the two, and I think there is a definite difference. R: Was Michael not with Father when He served? S: Yes, but I'm just saying when He served there was an act. I mean, there is a difference between action and being. When He served, He acted. I think when He worshiped He was with the Father, in other words, just being, existing with the Father. S2: May I interject here? R: Certainly. S2: I have located a page in the Urantia Book in a paper on the life of Jesus, on page 1616, teachings about career and worship. It says at the evening conferences on Mt Gerazim Jesus taught many great truths and in particular He laid emphasis on the following: He said that worship, contemplation of the spiritual, must alternate with service, contact with material reality. And it goes on to say that work should alternate with play. Religion should be balanced by humor. Jumping a few lines again to say, another distinction, worship is the technique of looking to the One for the inspiration of service to the many. So that sentence right there, to me, points out the interrelatedness of worship and service. They're separate in terms of defining them for our human minds, but they're absolutely connected things. S3: They're made of the same stuff, but they're expressed differently. S: Yes, that's what I wanted to say. S2: So I think actually we're probably all in agreement here. S3: Yes, one can worship through service, but not all worship is service. I'm sure that Rayson was correct when he said that you can worship through service. S: I agree with that. I have no difference of opinion about that. Question: If we practice the art of living, isn't that just walking worship? R: That is the point that I was attempting to make through the lesson. S: I like that very much. I will never forget that word, the art of living. You're right, living is an art. Worship, I feel, flows through all of that whether it's just seeing again a heron rise out of the creek bed, or sitting on the ocean thanking the Lord for this incredible beauty, or seeing a light in somebody's eyes because you've extended some help. It's all points of worship, ultimately, yes? R: That is true. S: This line about worship being the technique of looking to the one for the inspiration of service to the many makes me think about how they're interrelated, as you're doing service. I know for me I'm constantly having to check back in with the Father. Is this what I should be doing? So there's worship taking place at the same time. R: That is true. S: This says our thoughts precede our actions. Worship precedes the service, but it's happening milliseconds apart. It's commingled. R: Exactly, that has been the point of the lesson. S: We finally got it. Thank you, Rayson.
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**SOURCE:** tmtransctipts teamcircuits email archive August 10, 1998 Teacher Abraham T/R Nina |
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**SOURCE:** tmtranscripts teamcircuits email archive September 22, 1999. Teacher Abraham T/R ? |
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**SOURCE:** tmtranscripts teamcircuits email archive April 8, 2001. Teacher Elyon T/R Jonathan |
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**SOURCE:** tmtranscripts teamcircuits email archive May 04, 2001. Teacher Larenzo T/R Bill |